NYCC: Battlefield 1943 Dev Commentary

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The New York Comic Convention (which is being attended by our own man-of-at-least-two-talents, Kieron Gillen) is in full swing, and this year it is being attended by many videogame companies. This means a minor deluge of videos from various sources, some of which I’ll post up here. First up: Battlefield 1943, with a developer narrating. Now isn’t this interesting: signs of that Battlefield Heroes parallel development breaking through here? Quite possibly, it does look rather bright and smooth and beautiful. Also far away from the painterly militarism of Battlefield 2. I can hear the howls of anti-console anguish from here.

Additionally, there’s this comment in the GameTrailers thread: “no blood? i wish u could see his body teared apart” Er hmm. (There is blood.)

I thought EA/DICE had the arcade shooter audience covered by BF: Heroes? There’s no need to make a shiney, stripped down BF1942 when you’ve still got a fanbase that wants BF3. Only 3 classes? I would have thought that BF2142’s 4 customisable classes was the bare minimum for a decent class-based FPS. Apparently not.

I’m gonna be the first to say that this actually looks fun. They obviously don’t have a remake of BF1942 on the menu, and, as disappointing as that is, this looks like it will still be great fun. Planes, landing craft, running gunfights up the arms of Wake…they seem pretty faithful to the spirit, if not the execution, of Battlefield.

I was initially excited about this, then after reading that Kotaku article I feel deflated. What made 1942 and BF2 so awesome was the large numbers, the variety of kits and the team work that was present, 1943 seems like a half-arsed effort to try and capture some sales on the PSN and Live Arcade things.

I want a real successor to 1942/BF2, not this. I could rant for days on this!

My main source for that is here, before I get accused of ’stirring’, as my dad used to call it.

The dev chappie in the cam video Jim posted mentions most of the features which are rubbing people up the wrong way too.

Looks fairly fun to me, and might be worth a look if they keep the price low. About the only design decision that sounds questionable is the infinite ammo, which sounds like it’ll invite a bit too much camping for my tastes, but then I’m not really a Battlefield fan having missed the boat for 1942 and not really getting on with the demo for 2 so I’m not attached to how the game used to do things.

I loved BF1942 and BF:Vietnam. Never got the newer ones though. From a realism point of view, dropping infinite numbers of bombs from a Zero or Corsair isn’t much worse than dropping 10, then doing a low fly-by of an aircraft carrier to get replenished. It’d have to be quite cheap and crapware-free to prise me away from L4D and TF2 though.

Fuck sake, this is nothing about consoles. They are simpering for the masses. Consoles have players who are aware of this bull just like us pc folk have guys who buy every idiots who buy everything catering to casual violence.

The problem does not originate from a platform but an idealoligy. A set of priorities the developers\focus groups think is important.

Any of the die-hard BF2 fans want to skip over to ArmA2
BF2 is very arcade and cannot be compared to ArmA… but did you try Project Reality mod for BF2 ? The official multiplayer campaigns are quite fun !

[rant]DICE suck balls, they give us unfinished games then instead of finishing them with patches they make rip off expansions. Between Battlefield 2 and Bad Company they made nothing worth a full price game and many piles of turd, Bad Company was very impressive technically and massively lacking in content or variation, then comes Mirrors Edge with it’s four hour singleplayer and no multiplayer. I’ve given up on them and anything they output.[/rant]

Why release a half assed game with better versions already out though? I suppose the console release makes sense with them not having 42, but eh? I’m not angry it exists, just not in a hurry to spend money on it. Although, it will show the direction bf3 is taking so the right price might lure me in.

Wow I was actually pretty excited for this before I saw that video. It definitely comes across as a console 1st and PC afterthought approach. I want a real successor to BF1942, it was probably my all time favorite pc game.

I think most of the anger comes from the fact that this isn’t a remake of 1942, which we would all love. However that doesn’t necessarily mean this will be a shit game. All they have to do is raise the player cap a bit, and remove unlimited ammo on weapons like rocket launchers, and there you go, a nicely playable, fun game. Call me crazy, but i think the destructible terrain will be awesome.

I must admit, that while I try not to hate a game at “pre-alhpa” (snigger), I could think of few worse things to put out than a version of a game that appears less pretty, less varied and with no discernable new ideas, that I’ve played previously.

I have enjoyed the recent Battlefields, increasingly so, (not heroes) so I want to give it a chance. Why do they make it so hard?

They cant/wont port BF heroes but they want a arcadey version of the game like it on the consoles and its easy to port to pc so why not. As for the gimped out game its got to fit in the size limit for arcade games ms has in place, not sure what it is now days.

The ‘nice little roadkill, classic Battlefield moment’ looked really terrible. I thought he’d driven over the guy without effect until he got out to look at his corpse, due to the way he clipped through him. I remember all the other Battlefield games doing a nice ragdoll-over-the-bonnet thing.

I really don’t get what DICE is doing here, especially on the PC. The press release said that both 1943 and Bad Company 2 would be coming to PC so there will actually be three different Battlefield games released for the PC this year if the information is correct.

If this is the case, EA seem to be taking a very scattergun approach to multiplayer gaming by releasing as many different games at different price points and for different audiences, as possible and hoping that something hits the target.

I still don’t get why they’re doing this. There’s Battlefield Heroes for the combat-challenged people, why create another product for the same kind of crowd, at the same time (while also raping everybody’s expectations nonetheless)?